Contact between Chinese and Vietnamese: an over-researched field?

[Blogmaster’s note: I’m overjoyed by Alexis Michaud’s proposal to write a guest post for this blog. A skilful phonetician and determined fieldworker, Alexis will give an important legacy for the generations to come in terms of documentation and has a breadth of knowledge never failing to surprise, which the readers can see for themselves in this wonderful piece.]

This post is about a research topic that appears to belong squarely in the « Indo-Sinica » sphere: contact between Chinese and Vietnamese. That field could appear as over-researched and not at all a priority. Many highly endangered languages in Vietnam are likely to disappear before a good linguistic documentation is recorded; by contrast, the conspicuous Chinese component in Vietnamese has been the object of studies by Nguyễn Tài Cẩn, Wang Li 王力 and many others. There exist several dictionaries of Vietnamese readings of Chinese characters (the « Sino-Vietnamese » layer in Vietnamese: Hán-Việt 汉越), such as the wonderful 1932 dictionary by Đào Duy-Anh. But Đào Duy-Anh and Nguyễn Tài Cẩn belonged to the last generations of Vietnamese scholars who had excellent command of Classical Chinese. Following the demise of Chinese-language schooling in the early 20th century, Chinese philology has become much less accessible to Vietnamese scholars. This, together with general difficulties of the Vietnamese higher education system in recent decades, explains why there are relatively few specialists of Sino-Vietnamese within Vietnam.

On the Chinese side, relatively few linguists have followed in the footsteps of Wang Li 王力. My impression from exchanges with Chinese friends and acquaintances is that history textbooks, media and propaganda (宣传) depict Vietnam as a rebellious and secessionist Chinese province; and the Vietnamese as ungrateful neighbours, who received support from the PRC during their fight against Western imperialism and reciprocated by turning their weapons against the Chinese. Maybe this carries over to some extent into scholarly circles, explaining why few colleagues are attracted to the study of Vietnamese and Sino-Vietnamese?

Finally, in the West, funding agencies such as the Fulbright Foundation apparently place less emphasis on Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma… than on China (again for non-linguistic reasons), with the result that career opportunities for young scholars appear fewer.

What are the issues in Sino-Vietnamese studies that await further investigation? I’ll try to provide a few pointers concerning loanwords, which are still far from fully studied and exploited.

Borrowings from Chinese dialects into Vietnamese are far more numerous, and still far from being fully described and analyzed. As part of a team endeavour (led by Martine Mazaudon) to translate papers by Haudricourt , Guillaume Jacques and Marc Brunelle translated Haudricourt’s seminal 1954 articles about the reconstruction of Old Chinese and the origin of tones in Vietnamese, respectively. These papers adduce key evidence from Vietnamese. Haudricourt sorts Chinese loans in Vietnamese into various layers based on the sound correspondences (following the classical method of comparative linguistics). Strikingly, many of the examples are not commonly considered as loanwords. Others are generally considered as belonging to a layer of borrowing other than that to which Haudricourt assigns them. Here are two examples.

First example: an early loan into Vietnamese, not commonly considered as suchIn his usual elliptic style, Haudricourt does not spell out a complete argument about the history of each word. Did he facetiously pack his reasoning in the choice of gloss for the word: providing a gloss that is strictly correct neither for the Chinese original nor for the Vietnamese — a gloss that constitutes a hint about the hypothesized path of evolution? This seems to be the case in this example:

number

char.

K-OC

K-MC

[B-MC]

Vietnamese

[gloss]

GS 1109j

務 wù

mi̯og

mi̯uʾ

mjuH

mua [muəA1]

to get

In both Old Chinese and Modern Chinese, 務 wù is associated with two sets of meanings: ‘strive, exert oneself, be necessary’ and ‘task, affair’, but not ‘to get’. The meaning in Vietnamese is ‘to buy’. The best guess of the editors of the forthcoming volume is… that ‘to get’ is Haudricourt’s best guess on the semantics of this early borrowing: from ‘to exert oneself’ to ‘to get’, and later from ‘to get’ to ‘to buy’.

To my knowledge, sixty years after the publication of this article, no further research has been made into this, e.g. examining the words for ‘to buy’ in the entire Viet-Muong (a.k.a. Vietic or Việt-Chứt) language subgroup. This question is not hard to examine, building on the evidence collected on this subgroup in the last 60 years. For ‘to buy’, Arem has /mʊː/, close to Vietnamese /muəA1/. But comparative evidence from the entire Vietic group leads Ferlus to a reconstruction of ‘to buy’ as *caːk. Seen in this light, the Vietnamese word is clearly a case of lexical replacement, further borrowed from Vietnamese into some other languages of the subgroup, such as Arem and Rục. This confirms the plausibility of Haudricourt’s interpretation.

Second example: an early loanword commonly considered as belonging to the Sino-Vietnamese layer

In his analysis of the history of vowel changes in Chinese, Haudricourt lists correspondences between words reconstructed by Karlgren with the rhyme *-ək and words with two different rhymes in two different layers of Vietnamese borrowings. Haudricourt’s argument is that the vowel in Sino-Vietnamese readings is ă whereas an earlier stratum of loanwords has ɯ. This is confirmed by examining the Sino-Vietnamese readings of characters in the table below, as compared to the pronunciation of early loanwords. In Sino-Vietnamese, the character 特 tè reads đặc [ɗăkD2], and 墨 mò ‘ink’ reads mặc [măkD2], both with the vowel ă.

GS

char.

K-OC

K-MC

[B-MC]

Vietnamese

[gloss]

905

得 dé

tək

tək

tok

Sino-Vietnamese đắc [ɗăkD1]

to obtain

919k

德 dé

tək

tək

tok

đức [ɗɯkD1]

virtue

961h’

特 tè

dhək

dhək

dok

đực [ɗɯkD2]

male
(animal)

904c

墨 mò

mək

mək

mok

mực [mɯkD2]

ink

The gloss that Haudricourt cites for 特 tè represents the oldest sense of this etymon, i.e. ‘bull, male (animal)’, attested both in Old Chinese and as an early Vietnamese loanword. In Modern Chinese, the meaning of 特 tè is ‘special, exceptional’ (as also in Sino-Vietnamese, where 特 reads đặc [ɗăkD2]). The sense development from ‘male (animal)’ to ‘special’ is well documented from the end of the Old Chinese period onward. In this example, the early loanword and the Sino-Vietnamese loanword are well distinguished, and all is for the best.

But the word đức [ɗɯkD1] ‘virtue’ (德 dé) is less straightforward. The word apparently did not undergo any considerable semantic change in Chinese, unlike 特 tè (from ‘male’ to ‘special’); it was borrowed only once by Vietnamese, as đức [ɗɯkD1]. The form đức [ɗɯkD1] serves as the reading of the corresponding character (德 dé) in the system referred to as ‘Sino-Vietnamese’, and is therefore listed in dictionaries of Sino-Vietnamese. Since Sino-Vietnamese is defined as the Tang period reading of characters, it is tempting (but mistaken) to consider all Sino-Vietnamese pronunciations to date back to the Tang period. Haudricourt based himself on the sound correspondences; on the basis of this word’s ɯ vowel, he concluded that it must be an early loan: had it belonged to the Sino-Vietnamese layer proper (words borrowed during the Tang dynasty), one would expect it to have the vowel ă. In light of Haudricourt’s argument, it can be hypothesized that the early Chinese loanword for ‘virtue’ was carried over into the new (Sino-Vietnamese) system for reading Chinese characters.

Such interferences between different layers of Chinese borrowings in Vietnamese, which create exceptional readings within the Sino-Vietnamese system, are mentioned by Nguyễn Tài Cẩn 1979, who provides some wonderfully conclusive examples, and opens perspectives for fresh work. Were I to specialize in Vietnamese language history, I would love to collaborate with Dr. Trần Trọng Dương, from the Hán-Nôm Research Institute, who is working on an etymological dictionary of Vietnamese; also with SHIMIZU Masaaki, Mark Alves and John Phan, who would also be terrific participants in a collective endeavour. But I guess that, rather than delving deep into Vietnamese historical phonology, I shall continue to work mostly on the documentation and description of little-studied language varieties in the decades which hopefully remain before me. I’ll die with my fieldworker’s boots on — or rather, with 1 ‘phonetics’ boot and 1 ‘fieldwork’ boot on! So I thought I’d bring this topic to the attention of « a new generation of Sino-Tibetanists and SEA linguists » — to cite from this blog’s inaugural argument.

The macron indicates a short vowel. In closed syllables, Vietnamese contrasts long and short a, and long and short ɤ.
There’s a scintillating paper by Haudricourt on this topic (an exercise in ‘dynamic synchrony’). An English translation of that paper is available here, with a note on the state of the art.